Christians Who Watch 'Game of Thrones,' Nudity Are 'Recrucifying Christ,' Says John Piper

Good for Piper.

Even unbelievers find it “distasteful, exploitative and dehumanizing”.

Wiki article:

Despite its otherwise enthusiastic reception by critics, Game of Thrones has been criticized for the amount of female nudity, violence and torture, and sexual violence against women it depicts, and for how it depicts these themes.

The amount of sex and nudity in the series, especially in scenes that are incidental to the plot, was the focus of much of the criticism aimed at the series in its firstand second season. Actor Stephen Dillane, who portrays Stannis Baratheon, likened the series’s frequent explicit scenes to “German porn from the 1970s”. Charlie Anders wrote in io9 that while the first season was replete with light-hearted “sexposition”, the second season appeared to focus on distasteful, exploitative and dehumanizing sex with little informational content. According to the Washington Post’s Anna Holmes, the nude scenes appeared to be aimed mainly at titillating heterosexual men, right down to the Brazilian waxes sported by the women in the series’s faux-medieval setting, which made these scenes alienating to other viewers. And in the Huffington Post, Maureen Ryan likewise noted that Game of Thrones mostly presented women naked, rather than men, and the excess of “random boobage” undercut any aspirations the series might have to address the oppression of women in a feudal society. Saturday Night Live parodied this aspect of the adaptation in a sketch portraying the series with a thirteen-year-old male consultant whose main concern was showing as many breasts per scene as possible.

This is a photoshopped image released by the White House:

Fan of show / Article re above image

I really like the questions Piper asks in that article.

Can any body honestly say they thought porn was bad but Game of Thrones “checked”, as they say?

I agree with Piper’s conclusions, but if you take a look closely at 1 Tim 2:9, that passage really refers more to the cost and opulence of attire and adornment, not whether it covers, no? Not that I’m against coverage—one might contemplate that only those who could afford apparel that is immodest in cost would be able to afford an extra garment that didn’t protect from the sun and elements—but it does strike me that in this regard, our Biblical argument needs to be a little more sophisticated.

One word picture I like is from Leviticus 18—“uncover nakedness”—where the Hebrews assumed that someone who uncovered a lady’s nakedness had a little more in mind than merely using her as a model for a sculpture of Eve, so to speak. Now granted, that doesn’t mean necessarily that it applies to us today, but…..OK, let’s face facts, how many young ladies in entertainment make the big time not through stellar abilities, but rather by appealing to that 13 year old boy? So I think it speaks to a reality that we all can relate to.

And on a side note, somehow it explains some things that not only was the head of HBO invited to a state dinner, but also got asked for advance copies of this show.

How about a movie that portrays the nudity in an WW2 Jewish concentration/extermination camp?

I wonder if Jonathan is referencing Schindler’s List? I have never understood why some Christians have thought it was necessary and acceptable to visually portray nudity, even in that manner, in light of scriptural admonitions against such. I find no caveat in the Bible for this kind of exception to the nudity rules, and I certainly do not understand how the movie’s message would be in any way reduced by removing the actual nudity.

Jonathan, take a look at actual pictures of inmates when they were liberated from concentration camps like Dachau or Auschwitz. They are ordinary height, but about half to a third the ordinary weight of healthy adults. Anorexic is being generous in this matter, really.

In other words, you could not accurately represent what was seen in the “showers” of Dachau or elsewhere without horrifically abusing the actors and actresses involved. You would send the director to jail for a long, long time if he did that, no?

In the same way, if the director chose to portray the Zyklon B showers as being entered by young, attractive, healthy people….well, I think that you’ve got to admit that the proverbial 13 year old boy is at work again, isn’t he? He’s ignoring the fact that the victims were of all ages and had been subject to some of the cruelest treatment known to man. So I’d argue that you cannot accurately portray the horrors of the death camps with the nudity of today’s actresses and actresses. You can only titillate.

It’s worth noting that, far beyond Schindler’s LIst, the history of art does not show much nudity between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, when artists started reading the often obscene philosophical and historic works of the ancients and started to imitate the ancients. There is a pretense of artistic usefulness to some of it—portrayals of Eve, Venus, other characters of ancient mythology, harem life as portrayed in the Orientalist school—but as with Schindler’s List, it does not show the reality. One sees Venus coming out of the sea, or the odalisque reclining near the baths, but not the enslaved shrine prostitutes at Venus’ temples, and definitely not the fact that the odalisque is a slave hundreds of miles from home, and that the man who should be her husband is either dead or brutally castrated to serve as a harem eunuch.

Selective memory of a 13 year old boy, as it were. And it’s worth noting that the models are also generally those who….shall we say, make a living indulging the fantasies of overgrown 13 year old boys? For that reason, the centers of Renaissance art (and many of the succeeding centers in later times) have sadly become known as centers of sexual wickedness—the very name “Florence” or “Firenze” became a byword in Italy for pederasty because of the wickedness of her art community.

As Paul Harvey would have told us, remember “the rest of the story”. I’m not totally against art, but at a certain point, we’ve got to note what we’re actually seeing, not just what the art critics say to throw us off the trail.